Chris Hedges, Truthdig: ''When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of 'primitive' societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology.... The war on the Native Americans ... was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic.''

http://truth-out.org/news/item/8808-when-civilizations-die